More than any other single figure, Maximilien Robespierre is identified with, and blamed for, the terror and bloodshed of France’s revolutionary years, yet the hostility of contemporaries, historians and political commentators is not wholly justified.

Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly is Irish not in a straightforward or obvious way but is rather a metonymy for the citizen-outlier, the alternative history, the exemplary failure, the heroic victim, the road that is not just not travelled but is not on the map.

For all the mystique and mystification, imperialism, as Orwell recognised, is essentially a money-making racket, while the kernel of racism resides in the pretence that the exploited are not real human beings.

The debate over ethics and the role it might or might not play in economic life sparked by recent comments from President Higgins could be informed by a study of the Irish Enlightenment thinker Francis Hutcheson, who posited an objective source for our feelings of right and wrong.

A new study examines the case of the Irish immigrants who found themselves in the southern states at the time of the American Civil War and who circumstances dictated would declare for the Confederacy.

A new collection of translations from Derek Mahon defends the notion of a republic of letters, where writers do not write in the isolation of their own language but in a conversation that goes beyond temporal and geographical borders, as well as beyond cultural differences.